Pennsylvania: Network of Canal Ports

PENNSYLVANIA: NETWORK OF CANAL PORTS By HUBERTIS M. CUMMINGS* FTER the turnpikes came the canals, here to serve as aids to the highways, there to rival in a dangerous competition, but never wholly to supersede them. After the canals came the rail- roads, first as auxiliaries to serve them at many points in the problems of transportation, then to compete with them ever more dangerously, and finally to supplant them entirely-unmindful of a future day when a new sort of super-turnpike or new airways would threaten their destruction almost as fatefully. The history of business enterprise is never very simple. It was not so in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania when in the second quarter of the nineteenth century citizenry and legislators grew stubbornly minded to have a waterway empire of commerce for their own. Obstacles of terrain, mountain ranges altitudinous and obstinately transverse, long winding river and creek valleys whose streams sped downwards by rapid fall in many a treacherous current and over myriad barriers of rock, with floods ever a matter of baleful promise, dared not impede or deter them. Pennsylvanians put their minds to the task and, for better or worse, during the three decades after 1826 turned the Commonwealth founded by William Penn into a network of artificial canals and canal ports. Along the rivers of the State sprang up not only the Pennsylvania Canal, with its Divisions along the Delaware, the Susquehanna and its Branches, the Conemaugh, the Kiskiminetas, the Allegheny, the Ohio, the Beaver, and the Mahoning, but many a harbor of romantic name. From east to west ranged a new nomenclature. Points which in the eighteenth century gave names to ferries or frontier forts be- *Dr. Hubertis Cummings, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Cincinnati, is the author of Richard Peters (Philadelphia, 1944) and a fre- quent contributor to Pennsylvania History. As consultant to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, he is working on a study of early transportation in Pennsylvania. 260 NETWORK OF CANAL PORTS 261 came ports: Easton, Bristol, Columbia, Lewisburg, Muncy, Lewis- town, Beaver, New Castle, and Erie. Towns not assuming the proud name of "Port" became just as truly havens for canal trade: Harris- burg, Liverpool, Berwick, Blairsville, Franklin, Meadville. And, as on State-built canalways, so on those built by navigation com- panies, appeared others of now famous memory: Honesdale and Hawley; Palmerton, Weissport, and White Haven; Fairmount, Conshohocken, Leesport, and Schuylkill Haven; Union Deposit; Long Level, York Furnace, and Peach Bottom-on streams and rivers from the Lackawaxen to the lower Susquehanna. At a key point like Reading met two waterway systems, the Schuylkill Navigation and the Union Canals. Portsmouth, which began with that name at the mouth of the Swatara below Middle- town, presently became Port Royal, and was until 1884 the junc- tion basin of the privately owned Union Canal with the Common- wealth-built Pennsylvania Canal. Hollidaysburg, on the Franks- town Branch of the Juniata, was, for all westward flowing Penn- sylvania canal boat passengers and forwarders' shipments, the port of call from which their mode of canal transportation and travel must change to railway carriage and travel across Allegheny Mountain. Johnstown on the Conefnaugh was until 1855 the trans- fer point at which travelers and goods which had got there by the Allegheny Portage Railroad must change back to packet or barge to continue their way by the Pennsylvania Canal down to Pittsburgh and Allegheny Town. From earliest days the Port of Easton was a busy place. At it boats which had brought their coal down the corporately-owned Lehigh Coal and Navigation Canal from Mauch Chunk and the "Gravity" Railroad, which had carried it from Summit Hill to that up-Lehigh River point, locked first into the dam opposite the town, then from the dam into the Delaware Division Canal, providing tasks for inspector, weigh master, and toll collector. Tally of the weight of each was made at the weigh lock, where lowering of the water let its hull and cargo rest momentarily on great scales in the lock chamber. Then, after raising again by the water admitted through the wickets of the upper gates, the barge descended once more through the lower gates into the canal. So, from 1833 to 1931, passed millions of tons of anthracite, burdens en route to New York by New Hope, by rope ferriage across the Delaware River, 262 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY I I i I i i i I i I I i i I i i i NETWORK OF CANAL PORTS 263 from that town to enter the feeder of the Delaware and Raritan Canal and make their way onwards across New Jersey to South Amboy and the Bay-or en route to the Port of Bristol, whence it could descend, steam-tugs drawing the boats, to Philadelphia. Even more redoubtable was activity at Easton in 1846, when 7,907 boats cleared, 453,643 tons of anthracite passed the weigh lock southwards, 15,613,970 feet of boards and planks, 157,328 barrels of flour, 584,247 gallons of whiskey, great weights in wheat, leather, slate for roofing, staples, furniture, and other products or manufactures. Or when northwards of the weigh lock went 329,423 pounds of cotton, on their way from the South and the Ports of Philadelphia and Bristol; 1,036,523 pounds of green hides for up-river tanneries; 300 barrels of ale, beer, and porter; 823,529 pounds of coffee, 59,918 gallons of foreign liquors, imported wines and brandies to gratify the tastes of rich coal operators whose em- ployees were satisfied with the cruder beverages produced by more local stills; vast quantities of groceries, drugs and medicines, manufactured tobacco, hardware and cutlery, blooms and anchonies, bar and sheet iron from Durham and other furnaces. At Bristol in that same year 1846 the clearance of boats totaled to 8,275, a goodly commerce for a goodly harbor built at the river's side, grand southern terminus of the Delaware Division, nobly equipped with two entering liftlocks, two great enclosing piers. and a tide lock into the river, and with wharves, mills, shipping houses, and stables fringing the land side of its basin. Up the Delaware came into it manufactured tobacco in great quantity; a small gallonage in whiskey; a vastly larger one in foreign liquors; 29,925 pounds of mahogany wood; china ware, drugs and medicines, German clay, iron machinery, hardware and cutlery, dry goods, and groceries, all in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. For upper Delaware Valley folk had their connection with the great world that year by canal. And downwards from Bristol, the same folk forwarded or sent 387,786 tons of coal; 42,764,493 pounds of iron pigs; 15,391,590 feet of boards and planks; 294,676 bushels of lime; 775,974 gallons of whiskey-considerably more than were brought up; 181,588 barrels of flour; 13,955 pounds of butter. And expressive were the names of the boats which bore those several and numerous other products: appellations like the Great 264 PENNSYLVANIA HISTORY Western of Mauch Chunk, the Morning Star of the Northern Liberties of Philadelphia, the Shell Duck of Allentown, the Belle of Bristol, the Mary Ann of South Easton, the Here We Go of Shimer Ville, the Cincinnati of Lumberville, the Trailer of Point Pleasant, the Night Hawk of Milford, the Lexington of Erwinna, the Temperance of Uhler's Quarry, the Independence of Walnut Port, the Zephyr of White Haven, the General Jackson of Lehigh Gap. Poetry, history, household affections, love of home sites, romantic sentiment for distant places, zest for an expanding world -all were drawn upon to lend flavor to an era of commerce. So was it, too, at other ports in inland Pennsylvania. From Columbia to Pittsburgh, from Clark's Ferry to Williamsport or to Wilkes-Barre, from Port Clinton to Leesport to Reading to Fair- mount on the Schuylkill Navigation, the same types of affection and fancy gave to canalways everywhere their largesse of beauty in words. Yet at Columbia, where trains of cars from the Columbia and Philadelphia Railroad descended by incline plane into the harbor town and chugged to a stop alongside the boat slips, a new phenomenon was displayed. From car and from dock sectionalized boats were discharged and launched in the basin, laden with manufactures and merchandise from Philadelphia and its factories and importing houses, to resume their course on the Pennsylvania Canal for Middletown, Harrisburg, Lewistown, Hollidaysburg, and the Portage Railroad, that remote mountainous lane of tracks and ten inclines, for conquest of which they had been sectionally built hundreds of miles away from their crossing of Allegheny Mountain, and by means of which Pennsylvania statesmen and citizens aspired to link the commerce of Philadelphia with that of Pittsburgh. More also there was of activity at this Susquehanna River town, successor to old Wright's Ferry. Here the same canal which bore away argosies for the west brought coal from the north, coal from Nanticoke to lock out into the river; to cross it by towline sus- pended from towpath bridge to Wrightsville on the west bank until Civil War days and the burning of the old viaduct, and afterwards with the aid of steam-tugs until 1894; to proceed southwards by Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal to Maryland; to cross Chesa- peake Bay eastwards, pass through the Chesapeake and Delaware NETWORK OF CANAL PORTS 265 Canal to the Delaware River, and then onwards to Philadelphia and New York. And here at Columbia other anthracite coal, un- loaded by derricks and "grabs" from the boats, was heaped in lofty banks in post-Civil War years for trans-shipment by rail to Phila- delphia and other eastern Pennsylvania cities.

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